supply the deficiencies of the sign-language
by incorporating words from written language. Scagliotti, of Turin,
devised a system of initial signs[2] which begin with letters of the
manual alphabet, and Dr. Isaac Lewis Peet, of New York, has made a
similar application of manual letters to signs to suggest words of our
written language to the initiated deaf. But it should not be forgotten
that practice in finger-spelling is practice in our language.

[Footnote 2: _Quatrieme Circulaire_, Paris, 1836, p. 16. Carton's
_Memoire_, 1845, p. 73.]

The origin of finger-spelling is not known. Barrois, a distinguished
orientalist, in his _Dactylologie et Langage primitif_[3], ingeniously
traces evidences of finger-spelling, from the Assyrian antiquities down
to the fifteenth century upon monuments of art.

[Footnote 3: Barrois: _Dactylologie et langage primitif_, Paris, 1850,
Firmin Didot freres.]

The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans were familiar with manual
arithmetic and finger-numeration, as quaint John Bulwer shows by numerous
citations in his _Chironomia_ (1644). The earliest finger-alphabets
extant appear to have been based upon finger-signs for numbers, as, for
instance, that given by the Venerable Bede (672-735) in his _De Loguela
per Gestum Digitorum sive Indigitatione_, figured in the Ratisbon edition
of 1532.[4] Monks and others who had special reason to prize secret and
silent modes of communication, beyond doubt invented and used many forms
of finger alphabets as well as systems of manual signs.[5] The oldest
plates in the library of the National Deaf Mute College are found in the
_Thesaurus Artificiosae Memoriae_ of frater Cosmas P. Rossellius of
Florence, printed in 1579, which gives three forms of one-hand alphabets.
Bonet's work[6] of 1620 gives one form of the one hand Spanish manual
alphabet, which contains forms identical with certain letters in the
alphabets of 1579. This was introduced into France by Pereire and taught
to the Abbe de l'Epee by Saboureux de Fontenay, the gifted pupil of
Pereire. The good Abbe however continued to use a French[7] two-hand
alphabet which, he had learned when a child and which he said all
school-children knew. He mentions also a Spanish alphabet in part
requiring both hands, and remarks that different nations have different
manual alphabets. The Abbe Deschamps, a rival of De l'Epee, made use of a
finger alphabet in teaching the deaf to speak, which was not adapted to